Seeing as film is, without question, the superior medium, anytime a TV actor gets a big-screen role should be seen as their own success. A couple of these very instances have occurred today, with Deadline first reporting that Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) has snagged the headline role in Sex and Sunsets, a romantic picture that Jeremiah S. Chechik (that other film called The Avengers) will direct.

In writing the film, Megan Martin has adapted Tim Sandlin‘s novel of divided love and bizarre sights, which follows a dishwasher, Kelly Palamino, whose visual and aural hallucinations don’t get in the way of falling for Collette, a woman getting married that very day. Soon enough, he starts pursuing the newlywed, trying to prove that his bad reputation is nothing more than falsehood.

That sounds like an unsavory protagonist, but Chechik feels that Kwanten has “a balance of humor and edge” that allows him to “turn from vulnerable to threatening on a dime”; while this duality should make for a more interesting protagonist than just another putz, much of that relies on the source material and screenplay. And that’s something we can’t make a call on quite yet.

Serendipity Point Films are producing Sex and Sunsets, with shooting set to begin next month.

Next up, THR brings the news that Dianna Agron (Glee, I Am Number Four) is likely to occupy some room on the set of Malavita, having entered talks to join Luc Besson‘s comedic mob actioner alongside Robert De Niro, Michelle Pfeiffer, and, possibly, Tommy Lee Jones.

She’d be playing the daughter of De Niro and Pfeiffer, with Malavita seeing the former take on a mobster-turned-informant who changes his name from Giovanni Manzoni to Fred Blake, relocates his family to Normandy, and tries to create a settled life. Unfortunately, things spin out of control when violent tendencies — along with his wife’s penchant for arson — come into play during encounters with the city’s denizens. Eventually, the former friends he betrayed learn of his whereabouts and chaos ensues.

Malavita is slated to commence production next month and open in 2013.

Does either film strike you as particularly noteworthy? What is the choice in actors signaling?